December 14, 2004

Getting the Business

I've been crazy busy these days, running around doing holiday shopping and trying to get work done, particularly for a trial I have set to begin in late January. So I almost deleted the e-mail when I saw it. I was scanning through my e-mails on my hotmail account last week when I saw an e-mail about a Business Week article. Not being a big Business Week reader, I figured it was likely spam, but for some reason I opened it on the off chance it wasn't.

Turns out, it was an e-mail from an editor at the magazine. She said she had read one of my previous blog posts and wanted to include it in an article she was writing about gadgets (blackberries, Treos, etc.) She asked for my name and whether I'm still a practicing attorney in Louisiana and she mentioned that she was on deadline. She sent the message around 1:00 p.m. and I didn't get it until 6:00 p.m. (something about the craziness of practicing law kept me from attending to personal e-mails that day), but I wrote her back with my name and told her she was welcome to use it, but that if she did I would appreciate it if she'd e-mail me and let me know so I could look for it.

I never heard from her, so I presumed I hadn't responded quickly enough for her to meet her deadline and she'd passed on it. This morning, out of nothing more than morbid curiosity, I went to Business Week's web site. I searched for her name and the first article was about gadgets -- success! I scanned the article and found that she had indeed used some of the exact words from my post but didn't say where she got the story from. This irks me. My post was hardly the focus of the article -- it was just a tangential illustration -- but the article reads as though she made up the illustration on her own, which wasn't the case. Further, she could've at least e-mailed me to tell me she was using it, although I guess I wouldn't want to e-mail someone either if I was using their idea and not giving them credit.

*sigh* I'm going back to work.

Posted by Kitty at December 14, 2004 09:22 AM

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